Realistic Expectations

[wtg]

I agree with Sickboy. The tuner can always go into a new PC. At worst you might be throwing a little money away on a video card since you wouldn't use it on a new machine, but my guess is you can get it to work ok for SD video. It's when you start getting multiple tuners going, all with comskip being run in real-time and trying to watch something concurrently that you'll start to divert real money into the thing.

Careful though... PVR building is kind of like crack... you're never satisfied, you start hanging around with riff-raff (like this forum) and it consumes all your time and extra cash.

[jksmurf]

Careful though... PVR building is kind of like crack... you're never satisfied, you start hanging around with riff-raff (like this forum) and it consumes all your time and extra cash.

LOL... speak for yourself, scum !

[kmoore]

Hello,

I am looking for advice on a system I have laying around that I would like to use as a PVR. I have an old Dell Dimension Pentium III collecting dust that I would like to upgrade to use solely as a PVR. It only has an onboard video card and 128MB RAM so this would have to be upgraded correct?

Since it is only a PCI board what video card(s) are recommended? Do I need a video card to encode and decode or will one card suffice? I would like to hook this up to a 40" LCD via component or HDMI/DVI if at all possible - do they even make a vanilla PCI card that will handle this?

I plan on bulking the memory up to 512 (it's max), will this be sufficient?

I might be the most recent resident "expert" at running GBPVR on the crappiest hardware. I started with an HP Pavilion 4535 that was destined for the trash (bad HD). That's a Celeron 400. I added 7200rpm hard drives, extra ram, and I'm in the process of upgrading the CPU (several times). With the PVR-350, which does hardware encoding and decoding of MPEG-2, you can watch and pause live TV. You can also record and watch a recording at the same time. The interface is slow but a PIII 667 will be fine with a PVR-350. The down side is potential stability issues if the PVR-350 doesn't play nice with your Dell. I tend to have more faith in a commercial, OEM machine, even if that's been proven false. If you have $130 to play around with, pick up a PVR-350 and see how it goes. You'd be hard pressed to upgrade that machine to do respectible software decoding for $130, so you can look at it that way. Other downsides of the PVR-350 are the inability to do anything except view MPEG-2 files and use the GBPVR menus (even the weather plug-in works). That means no DiVX (et al) and probably photo viewing. But, the output quality is second to none.

In my experience 256MB isn't quite enough. I just upgrade to 384 and that seems to have stopped the swapping. For good measure, I'll get it up to 512MB as soon as I can score a DIMM.

I wouldn't bother with HD content with that machine. The Svideo will be more than adequate for SD content. I'm using composite and I think it looks good.